Institute of Commonwealth Studies
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University of London INSTITUTE OF COMMONWEALTH STUDIES Interview with VIC ZAZERAJ Key: SO: = Sue Onslow (interviewer) VZ: = Vic Zazeraj (respondent) SO: This is Dr. Sue Onslow talking to Mr. Vic Zazeraj at TransAfrica House in Johannesburg on the 15th of April 2013. Vic, thank you very much indeed for agreeing to talk to me. I wonder if you could begin by saying, please, how did you come to join the Department of Foreign Affairs in South Africa? VZ: Much to the despair of my parents I'm afraid. My father was a Polish airman stationed in the UK during the Second World War. My mother was English, and after the War my parents immigrated to Cape Town. I did not become an engineer or a lawyer, or a doctor as my parents would have preferred. I studied political science and political history and philosophy. I was doing post- graduate studies at the University of Cape Town when I got married and then I had to find a real job. I applied at the Department of Foreign Affairs to undergo diplomatic cadet training, and to see if I could make a career in the Foreign Service. I joined the Foreign Service in 1974 in Pretoria at a time when John Vorster was still the prime minister. Dr. Hilgard Muller was the Minister of Foreign Affairs and it was a particularly crucial time in the history of southern Africa. The coup d'état had occurred in Lisbon in April of that year. It heralded the withdrawal of Portuguese interest from Mozambique and Angola. Suddenly the strategic equation in southern Africa was fundamentally altered. So it was a very interesting time to join the Department of Foreign Affairs. What fascinated me at the time was that I was of a generation of young South Africans who believed that the country had a future: that we could find a way out of the political dead-end we were in at the time. It took another 20 years, from 1974 to 1994, but the people who were joining the foreign service at the time and going into politics at the time were the same generation as Roelf Meyer, Leon Wessels and others. We were all of the same generation, all believing that there was a way out: that the two fundamental forces in this part of the world which were Afrikaner nationalism on the one hand, and African nationalism on the other; were not necessarily destined to be permanently at loggerheads; that there was a way to find accommodation and find a future for South Africa. 1 The one who was articulating that view and inspiring most of us at the time was Pik Botha himself, who had been a Foreign Service officer for a long time. He had gone into politics and in his first maiden speech in Parliament had made the statement that South Africa should associate itself with the Universal Declaration of Human rights. He said a number of other things which inspired my generation to become involved in making some kind of contribution to South Africa’s future. So that’s how I landed up as a young cadet in the Department of Foreign Affairs. SO: Was the Department of Foreign Affairs, at that particular time, a natural recruiting point as far as the South African public service was concerned for English speaking South Africans? I'm just wondering if there was a particular English-speaking cohort among the wider white population that was attracted to it because it was the outward looking of all the civil service departments. VZ: That’s true; in fact the two departments in the civil service that attracted a larger number of English speaking South Africans were the Department of Defence - particularly the Navy and the Air force - and the Department of Foreign Affairs, that’s right; whereas many departments were almost exclusively Afrikaans. Those two were more or less a 50/50 which was a little unusual. So your question is spot on. SO: Also you identified very much a new generation coming through, joining the DFA at that particular point, with Pik Botha as very much your guiding light in terms of looking for a way out, as you emphasize, of the dead-end policies of Apartheid. At that particular time could the National Party be divided into the Verlichte and the Verkrampte -? VZ: Yes. SO: - sections? Or was it in fact a more complicated, a more complex political spectrum within the National Party? VZ: The party had already split in 1968 or ’69 over the sports policy. You remember the question of Basil D’Oliveira coming to play cricket in South Africa and the party had split over the question of mixed-race sports. The reconstituted National Party; in Afrikaans, the Herstigte Nasionale Party was formed, I think, round about 1969. The biggest preoccupation of the governing National Party at the time was not to allow that split to grow; in other words, to contain that split and it was at that point that Pik Botha decided to leave the relative security of the public service and go into a very uncertain future in politics. They gave him a constituency to stand in, the Wonderboom seat, which was held by one of those right wing leaders who had broken away. Many people at the time thought he was simply being thrown to the sharks. There was no way he could beat an established figure like the sitting MP, but he did. He was very consistent in his message. He was very frank; he addressed meetings all over the constituency. He was very active, and he won that election against the odds. That was very inspiring for a younger generation of South Africans wondering whether there was a role for people like us going into government service, into public service. That was a very inspiring development for all of us. 2 So to answer your question: the party split again some years later when the Conservative party of Andries Treurnicht was formed. The National Party at the time saw the biggest political threat to its continued control of government coming from the right. The African National Congress was not regarded as a political or military threat at that stage. Liberation struggle or no liberation struggle, they were not regarded as something that could defeat the State apparatus. SO: So when did you join Pik Botha’s office as his particular political adviser/assistant. VZ: In 1981. I had been abroad. After my cadet training I was transferred to Malawi for a couple of years, and from there I was posted to Finland and spent three years in Helsinki. I came back in 1980 and at the time Pik Botha was looking for a new private assistant. So I was appointed at that time, in 1981. SO: That was after the transition of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe to independence -? VZ: Yes. SO: - leaving South Africa and south West Africa as very much the embattled southern part of the continent. VZ: Yes. SO: This is also the era in which Apartheid South Africa was increasingly criticised in the Commonwealth and there were growing demands for economic sanctions, in addition to the military sanctions against South Africa. Did you hold any particular view? Did your colleagues within DFA have a particular view, at this time, of the role, or the value, indeed the relative unimportance of the Commonwealth as far as South Africa was concerned? VZ: The Commonwealth was always regarded as important. South Africa had left the Commonwealth in 1961 to become a republic. But the fact that the Commonwealth continued to exist, continued to play a role and exert, particularly in Africa, a very strong footprint, was an obvious consideration. Its impact was never underestimated. The difficulty for Britain, and I think we all understood this in the Department of Foreign Affairs, was that they could not sacrifice relations with the rest of Africa or the developing world in favour of supporting Apartheid South Africa. The values of the Commonwealth were simply not compatible with what was going on in this country. The dilemma that we had at the time was that here you had the Commonwealth which incorporated no end of military dictatorships, one party States, States where no black person had any rights whatsoever. In fact, I remember a Nigerian diplomat telling me at the UN that oddly enough the only country in Africa where a black man could take his own government to court and win was 3 Apartheid South Africa. You couldn’t try that in Zambia or Tanzania or Kenya, or Nigeria or anywhere else. So we had a very strange set of circumstances where the dilemma was that it wasn’t the fact that black people were denied their political rights in South Africa. The question was who was denying them their rights? If they were denied those rights by a black government, that was okay. So if you were denied the right to vote in Uganda or in Cameroon or somewhere else, that was acceptable. If it was a white government denying those rights, that was not acceptable. SO: So there was a difference between racial justice and absolute justice? VZ: This became a tricky issue in South Africa. It was something we grappled with. We also understood that this was a very complex issue for the Commonwealth and that the Commonwealth was trying to play a useful and constructive role. SO: When you say “we”, are you talking about the junior ranks of the DFA? VZ: Yes. We’re also talking about the Minister’s office in the Department of Foreign Affairs where these issues were discussed because the message coming to us from the Commonwealth was that we were running out of time.